Streets littered with bodies, families separated by violence, survivors traveling for days without food or water. These are the testimonies emerging from people who fled the western Sudanese city of El Fasher, which fell to paramilitary forces a week ago after an 18-month suffocating siege.
Fatima Yahya arrived in Tawila, a town west of El Fasher in Sudan’s North Darfur state. Tawila is ruled by a faction neutral to the conflict. She is still traumatized by being hungry for three days before finally escaping. Her husband and uncle are missing. The memories of what happened at El Fasher were difficult for her to put into words.
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Yahya told Al Jazeera: “Bodies were everywhere. In the streets, in the houses and at the gates of many houses.” “Everywhere you look in El Fasher, you’ll see bodies strewn about.”
Her testimony is one of many from people who fled the capital of North Darfur after it was captured on October 26 by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a militia fighting Sudan’s regular army. The RSF takeover gave it collective control of Darfur’s last major city held by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and solidified its hold across the vast western region.
Reports of mass executions, sexual violence and widespread looting have increased since the fall of El Fasher, a city that was home to more than a million people before the war.
Satellite images analyzed by Yale University’s Humanitarian Institute have identified at least 31 locations where objects consistent with human bodies and what researchers describe as reddish discoloration of the ground have appeared since the city was taken over.
Family separated in chaos
For those who fled, injuries from the initial battle made the journey even more difficult. Farhat Saeed left El Fasher with his daughter, even though they were both injured in shelling before the RSF’s final assault on the city. She said her husband had to stay behind with a severe fracture in his femoral neck as a result of the shelling.
“We had to stay for six to seven months under siege, shelling and shelling,” she told Al Jazeera. “It was hard to move him at all,” she added.
“When the fighting became too intense and the shelling became unbearable, my 11-year-old son asked me to run away from home to save his life,” she said. Her son remained with his father. The couple feared that it would be too dangerous for their son to cross the RSF line as a man, even though he was only a child.
The two-day journey on foot, which would have been impossible for Saeed’s husband, involved “walking and even running under heavy artillery fire from El Fasher” and passing through RSF checkpoints. The mother and daughter arrived in Taouira, about 65 kilometers west of El Fasher, without any money or belongings. Saeed told Al Jazeera that her daughter still needs treatment for her injuries.
Khadiga Abdallah, 46, experienced a similar trauma. She lost her husband a year ago in RSF shelling and was injured herself. Due to the siege, the residents had no choice but to survive by eating whatever they could get their hands on.
“We did not have access to our usual food, sorghum, for six months,” she told Al Jazeera. Abdallah said he was forced to eat ambaz, the residue left after pressing oilseeds normally fed to livestock, because there was no other food available in El Fasher.
After traveling for three days without eating, Abdallah arrived in Tawila with his two children. One person suffered severe psychological trauma after witnessing the violence and was immediately hospitalized. Her uncle was killed in a shelling and her brother’s children remain missing.
These reports are consistent with broader evidence of organized violence. The World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed that at least 460 patients were killed in an RSF attack on a Saudi maternity hospital in El Fasher. WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeyer said medical workers were also taken away in the first attack.
Those who reach safety face serious health challenges. Médecins Sans Frontières medical teams in Tawila examined the children upon arrival and said malnutrition was affecting all children under the age of five.
Survivors have left behind physical evidence of their ordeal, including torture, bullet wounds from the escape, and gastrointestinal illnesses from months of eating livestock feed.
Far fewer arrivals than expected
The International Organization for Migration estimates that more than 70,000 people have been evacuated from El Fasher and surrounding areas since October 26. But humanitarian workers in Tawira, which already hosts more than 652,000 displaced people, reported that far fewer people are arriving there than El Fasher’s population suggests.
Yale University’s Institute for Humanitarian Studies noted that unlike previous RSF takeovers across Darfur, such as the attack on the Zamzam concentration camp in April, recent images showed no visible signs of a mass exodus from El Fasher.
As Zamzam’s estimated 500,000 residents were evacuated, researchers were able to see hundreds of people and donkey carts on the road leading away from the camp. But when it comes to El Fasher, “the vast majority of civilians are dead, captured, or in hiding,” the Yale researchers concluded.
Mirjana Sporjalić, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, described the situation as “horrific” and warned that tens of thousands of people could be trapped without food, water or medical assistance.
Demanding responsibility internationally
Pope Leo XIV on Sunday joined the growing international condemnation of the death and destruction in El Fasher, condemning “indiscriminate violence against women and children, attacks on unarmed civilians and serious obstacles to humanitarian work.”
He called for an immediate ceasefire and the opening of humanitarian corridors.
Senators from both parties are calling for stronger action. Republican Sen. Jim Risch, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the violence was intentional, not accidental, and called for the RSF to be officially designated a “foreign terrorist organization.”
RSF announced the arrest of several fighters, including a commander named Abu Lulu, who appeared in an execution video seen by Al Jazeera’s Sanad agency.
Survivors like Yahya, Saeed and Abdallah now receive minimal support in overcrowded displacement camps, but questions of accountability feel distant.
Activists at Tawira camp told Al Jazeera that the surge in arrivals is making it difficult for aid workers to protect people and provide other essentials.
“We pray to God to help us,” Said said, speaking for the thousands of others who have made the same desperate journey from El Fasher.
